#IÞ ''It's nice to finally be able to put aface to the humiliating nickname." . was bogged down in David Fromkin's ''A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modem Middle East." No one at the C.EA. had much time to read, though, or to think. The bookshelves that lined Paul (Jerry) Bremer's office at C.EA. headquarters were nearly bare when I visited him in August. Rudolph Giuliani's "Leadership" was on one shelf; a book about the man- agement of financial crises was on another, near a box of raisin bran. On Bremer's desk, next to a wood carving inscribed "SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS," were several marked-up reports about postwar Iraq. A pile of maps detailing Iraq's power grid, administrative districts, and railroad lines sat on a coffee table. Bremer, who is sixty-two, has the thick hair, boyish eyes, and willful jaw of a Kenned He was wearing a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, khakis, and com- bat boots. An intelligent, disciplined technocrat with an even temperament, Bremer almost always seems focussed on the operational: he has mastered the in- terconnectedness of Iraq's utilities and can rattle off dozens of budget numbers. A question about the historical prece- dents for his position led him almost di- rectly to the urgent need for a twenty- kilowatt generator at an oil refinery in Basra. Iraq is a non-stop crisis, and the C.EA. exists in a temporal as well as a 78 THE NEW YORKER., NOVEMBER 24, 2003 . spatial bubble; any attention to the past or toafuhrrebeyondclllrtyda isal Bremer speaks directly to Iraqis every week on television and radio. He also meets with dignitaries around the coun- trr He is personally popular and is re- garded as modest and hardworking; ac- cording to a recent Gallup poll, twice as many Baghdadis approve of him as dis- approve. (President Bush, by contrast, has more detractors than supporters.) His ap- proach to the task of leading a chaotic foreign country toward self-Me is largely technical. Under pressure or criticism, he resorts to figures. Throughout the harsh summer, Bremer explained over and over that the power outages came from a lack of capacity in the system, aggravated by looting, sabotage, and the collapse of civil administration. But when he announced in August, "We're going to be thirty to thirty-five per cent short once we get everything working," Iraqis didn't under- stand why the superpower couldn't do better. (The electricity situation has im- proved considerabl ) When Bremer tells them that they're now free to take re- sponsibility for their own lives, that mes- sage, too, often fails to sink in. Bremer is aware of the deeper prob- lems of the occupation. "You have to understand the psychological situation that Iraqis are in," he said when I asked why Iraqis appeared to appreciate so lit- tle of what the C.EA. has done. "They went from this very dark room to the bright light in three weeks. It's like somebody just threw a switch. And your mentali1}r, if you're an Iraqi, still is: It's the government that fixes things. The government fixed everything before, for better and for worse-they did every- thing. And here comes a government that can throw out our much-vaunted Army in three weeks, so why can't they fix the electricity in three weeks?" The psychological gap between Iraqis and the C.EA. remains wide. Most of Bremer's confidants are Americans. When he leaves the palace, it's necessarily under heavy security: "It is an epistemological problem," one of Bremer's senior advisers said, describing the experience of leaving the Green Zone. "You wonder, 'What's going on out there?' You s and then , al " once you re out you overan yze. Of course, the C.EA.'s isolation and inaccessibility are also partly deliberate. "I've just reorganized the strategic-co1Jl- munications center here," Bremer told me, a day after ordering one of his aides not to speak with me. The situation is compounded by the failure of the C.EA.'s own news outlet. The Iraq Media Net- work produces a mixture of C.EA. an- nouncements and Arabic music videos- programming so reminiscent of TV under Saddam's regime that most Iraqis get their infonnation from AI J azeera and Iranian broadcasts instead. The C.EA. has thus far squandered the chance to begin the civic education that will be vital for Iraq's transition to democragr. As with so many other aspects of the occupation, the origins of the problem lie ill Wash- ington: the insipid programffilng reflects the Pentagon's desire to proclaim free"- dom in Iraq without doing the harder, riskier work of helping Iraqis create the necessary institutions. In this sense, the intellectual failures of the planning con- tinue to haunt the occupation. O ne searing day, I joined Bremer's press pool, following him by Chi- nook helicopter as he hop scotched across the southern desert. The first stop was a maternity hospital in Diwaniyah; its for- mer director, a gynecologist, now serves on the Governing Council, the American- appointed Iraqi interim authority: Bre- mer, who forces himself to endure a suit and tie at public appearances, was received by local dignitaries in kaffìyehs He told